Welcome to Data Centre Management magazine
Data Centre Management (ISSN 1753-9897) is the magazine and website for data centres and server rooms.
Register today for your free subscription and you'll be joining some of the most influential IT leaders in the UK who have already signed up for regular print copies.
Data Centre Management's new RSS Feeds also deliver the latest news to your desktop. More feeds will be coming over the coming weeks.
| Greening the data centre |
| 13 Jun 2008 | |||
|
Tom Bishop, chief technology officer, BMC Software looks at the factors driving virtualisation and the greening of the data centre A variety of factors are driving the emerging industry trend of “greening” the data centre. A “green” data centre is one that is designed to be energy efficient and minimise its impact on the environment. One problem is that many IT organisations have reached — or are approaching — the power and cooling capacity limits of their data centres. As a result, it is difficult to accommodate or expand the IT infrastructure. However, they still have to respond to continually increasing demands for business services that require more servers, more storage, and more network elements. Another concern is that energy costs are high and rising to the point where power and cooling now account for a significant portion of IT operations costs. In addition, organisations are coming under increasing pressure to become good corporate citizens by reducing their power consumption to conserve energy.A major contributor to excessive power consumption in the data centre is over-provisioning. Organisations have created dedicated, siloed environments for individual application loads, resulting in extremely low utilisation rates. The result is that data centres are spending a lot of money powering and cooling many machines that individually aren’t doing much useful work. Some are even sitting idle. Innovation
Processor vendors, hardware vendors, software vendors, and IT organisations are all working to address the problem. Processor vendors are developing more energy-efficient technologies, such as dual-core processors and CPUs that are automatically throttled based on workload. Hardware vendors are developing energy conservation technologies, such as energy-efficient fans. Software vendors are providing server and storage virtualisation technologies that enable IT to lower the number of physical devices that need to be powered and cooled. The primary approach that IT organisations are taking to reduce power consumption in their data centres is to consolidate and virtualise their data centre environments. This consolidation and virtualisation is a complicated undertaking that requires deploying not only the right number of physical devices, but also the right types of physical devices. Determining the right number of servers means including the right number of physical servers and virtual servers that can be accommodated in each physical server host. What’s more, IT has to ensure that the resulting server configuration reduces power consumption and can handle current workloads at agreed-upon service levels and provide sufficient room for growth. Power consumption and cooling must be considered in consolidation and virtualisation. Newer processor chips consume more power and generate more heat than their predecessors. In addition, newer chips have lower maximum operating temperatures than their predecessors, so they may require more cooling. Moreover, as a result of the higher power consumption and greater cooling requirements of the new processors, usable rack density (the number of servers a rack can accommodate) is decreasing. That places a limit on the number of new servers that a datacentre can accommodate based on available rack space. It is important to note, however, that although the new servers consume more power, they can perform more useful work than their predecessors. So, when choosing servers, it’s essential to consider both performance characteristics and power and cooling requirements. It’s like choosing an automobile based not only on how fast it can go, but also on how many miles per gallon it can achieve. It’s important for BSM solution providers to offer solutions that enable organisations to identify under-utilised servers, consolidate and virtualise their data centres, and to effectively manage the resulting dynamic, virtualised environments. The “greening” of the data centre introduces a new dimension into server consolidation and virtualisation; that is, the need to factor in server power consumption and cooling requirements when planning, implementing, and managing the consolidated, virtualised environment. What is required is a way to monitor, measure, and report on power consumption. Hardware vendors are beginning to instrument their servers to monitor such things as voltage, temperatures, airflow, and power at the overall server level. Initially, this real-time monitoring is used to drive illuminated alerts. History is not maintained and monitoring is not available to software. Hardware vendors need to enhance this monitoring capability by making it available to software, permitting solution vendors to enhance their solutions with power consumption awareness. This enables the BSM solutions not only to monitor device power consumption in real time, but also to create a historical database of power consumption by device. BSM solutions can leverage power information to enhance management of the consolidated/virtualised IT environment. They can use real-time monitoring to provide an early warning of out-of-limits power conditions. They can also use historical power consumption information in a variety of ways, such as in server consolidation and virtualisation planning, capacity planning, change planning, and continuous improvement. Eventually, hardware vendors could increase the granularity of power monitoring, such as by monitoring at the motherboard level. BSM solution vendors could then further enhance their solutions to measure power consumption at the operating system instance level (physical and virtual). In this way, the solutions could correlate power consumption with specific application transactions and workloads, and associate the cost of power with the applications consuming it. With this capability, IT organisations could optimise the ratio of work output to power consumption. The overriding business benefit of “greening” the data centre through consolidation and virtualisation is optimising power efficiency to gain maximum work output per watt consumed. This will help reduce operations costs. It will also permit organisations to continue to expand services to meet increasing business demands without requiring additional power and cooling, a benefit that is especially important to those organisations that have already reached the power and cooling limits of their data centres.
|